Heather Thomas’s 20 years of experience in the fields of art and digital management, from Tate to the Royal Academy of Arts, holding a MBA at the Copenhagen Business School seem to be the living proof that a day CAN last more than 24 hours for passionate and talented human beings. Her love for nature led her to personally fight climate change by creating a sustainable eatery and food education centre, The Mindful kitchen, her training with Al Gore to become a Climate Reality Leader, and fundraising campaign for Sustain alliance.
She is now in Venice where she will keep her commitment to the environment alive with the Science Gallery Venice, the network created in synergy with Ca’ Foscari University to stimulate and widen young people’s minds by pushing them to confront with the big global challenges through a unique collision of art, science and technology.
What is your role here at Ca’ Foscari and what was your previous role?
I’m the deputy director of Science Gallery Venice and, with this role, I am new to Science Gallery as well. I’m the person on the ground who’s trying to develop the infrastructure to take SGV from an idea to a reality. Each Science Gallery has a relationship with a University, and the relationship for us, here in Venice, is with Ca’Foscari. What we are trying to create with our partners is a porous membrane that aims at breaking down the barriers that were built up between the university system and the people that populate it, the experts, and the general public. So, we ask ourselves: how can we, by engaging the public with research, ideas and, predominantly, young people, impact the University? It is a two – way street and It’s all about creating a better future. I’m here to develop a close relationship with young people and, by young people, I absolutely mean students at Ca’ Foscari, and young researchers in university, enabling them to connect to students of other universities, not just within Venice, but also within the region. In this regard, with the program “Young Voices”, which has developed already, we are working to create a stronger relation with a wide cross section of young people, get them working together, to understand their perspectives and how we can best be developing programs that really fit the needs of young people, as young people see them. As we’re on a developmental stage, that’s critically important, because we need to understand their needs in order to start our programming in relation to expertise, putting infrastructure together, the building and the money we need. Ten young people – to start – will be selected to form this board, the Young Voices board application deadline is the 1st of December and there will be a big recruitment event on the 12th of December so, before Christmas the board will be appointed and then we’ll get started having brainstorming sessions with the young voices in January. The SGV programme will start as soon as 2018 and we will move into our building in San Basilio in 2020.
What impact do you think Science Gallery Venice is going to have on Venice and its citizens?
We have different audiences: our primary audience is young people, our secondary audience are multi generational locals that live both here on the island or on the mainland, and than people that live further in the Veneto region. All of those people are similar, but different at the same time, and their experience, based on their geography and their position in life, will be different.
We start by asking the question: “what does it mean to be fully human?” That’s our big question around which everything hangs, and we’ll be exploring it through the lens of cultural heritage, climate change and digital technology. How do I think people will receive this, and what do we think the impact will be? Well, What we really want to do is open people’s minds to greater interconnectivity, to push a shift of perspective, which could lead them to think less linearly and wider. For Venice we would like to contribute to the conversation about regeneration. For young people, we hope to be able to inspire them with the tool of curiosity, so that they can help to create a future for themselves in Venice if that’s what they want. If students want to stay here, how can we enable them to find ways to stay in here by creating something new in a means that can provide them with an income, so that it is feasible? That’s our small contribution to the wider question of your generation. At the same time, there’s also this sense of connectivity and of what is Venice to the world. La Serenissima has been the muse of the world for centuries, and it is, that’s why 23 million people come here every year! SG offers something different in terms of cultural experience and, with this idea of looking at how the past impacts the future, we ask ourselves how cultural heritage can inform the creation of the future, so that Venice can become not just a place that showcases imagination from the past, but can actually become known as a hub for imagination.
Science Gallery Venice will have a special focus on sustainability; what experience can you bring to such a wide topic, given your personal and professional background?
What cultural institutions can do really well is to push forward conversations that can be difficult in other places. What the cultural field can do is to create the safe space, a less political one, for conversation. As far as sustainability is concerned, we hope to use the platform of SG to push some of those conversations forward. Since there have been some controversies around the lagoon, we want to be sensitive, because it is a complex issue, but still find a way to push the conversation forward faster. I think one of the things that we can do consists in helping people understand the connectivity between man and nature. There’s one project in particular that we’re talking about, where we want to create intervention throughout the city and perhaps, ideally, on the vaporetto, where people encounter artists in a playful way, when they go on the boats. You might see an old woman holding a jar collecting the bora and, hopefully, somebody goes up to her and asks what is she doing. She would tell the story of how the most valuable thing to her, that she wants to capture, is the wind, because the wind is historically what enabled Venice to go and see the world and, physically, brought the world to Venice, and how relevant is that today. We try to encourage people to not just be looking at what man built, but how that was only possible because we are in an intrinsically relation with nature. Those are the sort of things that we’re doing, so we want to make it very comfortable and safe to talk about how humans are a part of nature and how you can’t divorce one from the other.
Is this going to be one of the first activities of SGV or are there going to be other activities first?
It is going to be one of the first activities in 2018, but we are still planning other performances. We do have to find funding so, we do have a lot of plans in the artistic field and it is developing. You should be expecting something before that; we will be exploring similar things.
As you said before, young people are essential to SG and to the future, so, which challenges do you think SG will help youngsters solve?
Science Gallery International develops its programming primarily around are those studies, conducted by the World Economic Forum, regarding the issues that are most important to young people in the world today. Ideally, one of the major things we want to help young people with consists in developing a sense of resilience, to widen their perspective with a positive outlook for the future. By developing these skills, their Creativity is fuelled by problems, but in an optimistic and solution orientated outlook. Whilst we want to engage them in programming and labs in order to help them to fuse skills and major world challenges to find solutions that also help them eventually to create jobs. We hope to bring young people together with people of different generations and cultures so, to look at the world through a bigger lens and, with that, learn to start challenging their opinions and perspectives on things as well. Resilience, optimism, perspective shift and then, fusing it with the development of creative skills to empower people. Hopefully, when we have a chat with the Young Voices, we’ll understand much better how to take that from something broad to something more specific.
Could you name your top three priorities in life?
Number one is nature, absolutely! Being in nature and being inspired by nature is the most important thing to me. Number two is human relationships, and number three is: being a change – maker, so if those two things are important to me, what is it that I can do to help change the world for the better in the short time that I’m here?
Who would your dream dinner guest be?
It would probably be…. John Muir, who was the founder of the Sierra Club, he was a naturalist in the early 20s, he really was one of the first people to start thinking about man’s relationship to nature. And then, since I’m in Italy, I will add to that: Elena Corner, she was the first woman who got the university degree, I would love to know from a woman’s perspective how it was like back in the day.
Interview by Valeria Sforzini
